Exam 70-536

This is the name of the incredibly boring exam that you must take before you can take any of the possibly less boring exams that then make you a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist. While I was in Sweden, I had a crack at taking this exam...and passed it. Not just passed, but passed quite strongly: I got 88%, while the pass mark is 70%. Not bad.

The really annoying thing is that even though I've been doing .Net development commercially for quite a while now, that only sort of helps. While you can get so far with a general understanding, the test is, in a large part, about memorizing a bunch of method and class names from the standard library. For bits of the standard library I've used quite a bit, that wasn't so bad; for the other bits, it was a case of madly trying to cram them into my brain in the few days before the test (because, being me, I didn't think to start preparing until a few days before).

As an aside, tonight I logged onto the Microsoft Certified Professional site. What a steaming pile of crap that is! Took me three attempts to log in, took me in a loop while entering the activation code, and once I did log in trying to view the list of exams I'd passed just to check the one I expected was on there gave...a .Net Application Error! Oops. Guess they shoulda got some ASP.NET certified technology specialists to write it for 'em... :-/ Ah well, one more exam and I'll have something shiny to wave at anyone who thinks such things matter...